In Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, a mobile terminal (referred to as a User Equipment or UE) connects to the cellular network via a base station (referred to as an evolved Node B or eNB). Previous releases of the LTE specifications supported communication between the UE and the eNB over either a single carrier for both the UL (uplink) and DL (downlink) in the case of TDD (time division duplex) mode or separate UL and DL carriers in the case of FDD (frequency division duplex) mode. LTE-Advanced extended the capabilities of LTE systems with support of carrier aggregation, where up to five CCs (component carriers) are aggregated in order to support wider transmission bandwidths up to 100 MHz. The CCs may also be referred to as serving cells. One CC is termed the Pcell (primary cell) and the other CCs are referred to as SCells. Subsequent releases of the LTE specification will provide support for up to 32 CCs. A primary concern of the present disclosure is efficient transmission of data acknowledgement signals by a UE to an eNB in response to DL data transmissions over a large number of DL CCs.